


be your own hero

by larajeansong



Category: Assassination Classroom
Genre: Angst, Friendship, Gen, Happy Ending, Kaede Kayano Defense Squad, Moving On, Post-Canon, Sister-Sister Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-25
Updated: 2016-12-25
Packaged: 2018-09-12 02:24:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9051481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/larajeansong/pseuds/larajeansong
Summary: Kaede Kayano is sixteen years old when she realises Nagisa Shiota will never love her back.She doesn’t cry. Her sister is dead. Her most beloved teacher is dead. She is alone in this world, and Kayano has been alone for a while now. While she may be friends with everyone in 3-E, she’ll never be able to share in their camaraderie knowing that most of their friendship was a lie.But in the end, Nagisa Shiota is just a boy.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This was supposed to be a meta-headcanon-rant thing, and it ended up being an actual fic about Kayano and All the Amazing Potential She Had That Was Never Fulfilled.
> 
> If you're a Nagisa/Kayano shipper looking for Nagisa/Kayano romance, you're going to be disappointed.
> 
> Happy holidays!

Kaede Kayano is sixteen years old when she realises Nagisa Shiota will never love her back.

She doesn’t cry. Her sister is dead. Her most beloved teacher is dead. She is alone in this world, and Kayano has been alone for a while now. While she may be friends with everyone in 3-E, she’ll never be able to share in their camaraderie knowing that most of their friendship was a lie.

Nagisa hasn’t met up with her in three months. It’s been one month since they last talked, and before that, his messages grew shorter and shorter, until she was practically talking to herself.

Kayano looks at her phone. She sighs, quiet and resigned.

But in the end, Nagisa Shiota is just a boy.

* * *

Life after 3-E is not easy — not that it was easy before. Kayano had treasured the pain of the tentacles sometimes, when she tried to think about Aguri and the back of her neck screamed _murderer murderer murderer, don’t think about her, think about how he killed her._ Now that Korosensei is dead and Kayano’s tentacles are gone, she has nobody but herself to distract from the gaping hole her sister left her in life. A crush on a boy isn’t going to change that.

She runs into Itona by chance. She’s trying to finish her homework in a tiny cafe on a street out in the middle of nowhere, because sometimes her apartment is too large for one teenage girl and she needs to work in places obscure enough she won’t be recognised. When she’s decided she’s done enough for the evening, she ducks out of the cafe and onto the street, where she catches a glimpse of a purple bandana disappearing around the corner.

Lots of people wear bandanas. Just not in July.

That doesn’t mean Kayano should care, but she finds herself hurrying down the street anyway.

“Hey, wait!” she calls, hitching her backpack higher up her shoulders. If she’s wrong about this, she’ll look like such a fool. “Wait!”

She runs around the corner and nearly crashes right into him.

“Kayano,” he says, regarding her with those unreadable golden eyes, and oh no, he’s mad at her, isn’t he, she should’ve been more careful, this is so embarrassing —

He gives her a smile, faint but definitely there. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen you.”

He was in this part of town to check out his father’s old factory, see if he can get it up and running again, and he’s optimistic about what he’s seen. Kayano congratulates him on that and invites him to her apartment for tea and sweets.

“I have way too much pudding on my hands,” she says with a sigh, surveying her kitchen for some of the pudding in question. “Do you want some? I need to get in shape for my next role, so I can’t eat any of it.”

Itona is happy to take it off her hands. He sits in her living room, sipping tea and scanning her apartment with a practised eye. “This place is very nice,” he says, and when Kayano turns to reply, “You keep looking at my bandana.”

“I-I’m sorry.” She blushes.

“Don’t be. How’s your neck?”

Kayano’s hand goes to the back of it, more from instinct than anything else. When she first got her tentacles removed, Itona’s bandana always started an itch there that felt so real, only the fact it wasn’t painful enough to actually be tentacles kept her from ripping her skin off. One time during class, she spotted Terasaka jokingly ruffling Itona’s hair and calmly excused herself, saying she needed to use the bathroom, and barely managed to make it into the hallway before biting down on her palms to muffle the scream because she was so sure the tentacles were growing back and she could never get rid of them.

“It rarely hurts anymore,” she replies. Omitting the fact that when it does hurt, it hurts a _lot._ Thankfully, she doesn’t have much reason to think about tentacles anymore.

Itona cocks his head. “You could wear a scarf. Like I do with my bandana. It helps.”

She sets down a spoon and a cup of chocolate pudding on the table for him. “I could,” she says. “But I can’t just wear a scarf every time I’m on set, and I’m on set pretty often.”

He eats a spoonful of pudding. “You went back to being an actress?”

She’s a little surprised he hasn’t heard of Haruna Mase’s return to the acting scene, but to be fair, Itona doesn’t seem like the person to pay attention to that sort of thing. “Yes, I am. I enjoy it.” She shrugs. “It’s also my best way to make a living right now.”

Itona nods. “It’s the same with me,” he says. “The bounty gave me enough I can go to school and pay for meals, but otherwise, I’m living off of whatever I get for fixing people’s things.”

“It’s not so bad, living this way.”

Itona blinks at her — his eyes are huge and a unique shade of gold that’s hard to miss — and nods again. “It’s not so bad.”

Kayano drinks tea with him for a little while; he compliments her pudding. (Kayano is very much a stress baker.) He leaves half an hour later.

“Thank you,” she says. Her apartment feels less enormous when someone else is there. “For coming by.”

“You’ve let your pigtails down,” he says, inclining his head.

“Yes, I have,” she says. “I always have too much pudding on my hands, by the way.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

* * *

One night, Kayano is cleaning out her bedroom when she finds a small, carefully sealed box labeled _Memories_ ♡ in a hand that isn’t her own. She exhales, slashes the tape keeping the box shut with a kitchen knife, and pulls out a photo album of the Yukimura sisters.

“Oh,” she whispers, soft and reverent and so completely alone.

She flips to the first page. Aguri’s handwriting is careful, precise, in the way a middle school teacher’s has to be. Kayano pulls out a photo of the two of them on a beach together, Kayano smiling brightly because she knows how to handle the glare of the sun, seeing as she has to deal with cameras so often, but Aguri's squinting adorably in irritation. Kayano swallows and puts the photo back in.

She looks through the rest of the box. A book Aguri used to read aloud to her. DVDs of Kayano’s performances. Gifts Kayano bought her, like a stuffed bear or a (now empty, obviously) box of chocolates. Another photo album.

Kayano pulls out one of Aguri’s t-shirts. There’s a picture of a smiling cartoon rice ball on it. She slides it over her head, forces her arms through the sleeves, and stands up, checking herself out in the mirror.

It’s so ridiculous, she actually bursts out laughing. She’s growing up to look nothing like her sister.

She decides to use the t-shirt as pajamas. It’s comfortable, and sometimes she can convince herself it smells like Aguri.

* * *

A director she’s worked with in the past offers her a role as a protagonist in a film based on a book she’s never heard of, so she goes down to the library to check it out. To her surprise, Kirara Hazama is there, gloomy as always.

“Kayano,” Hazama says with a nod, giving off the impression she’s not displeased to see the other girl. Kayano figures that’s the best she’s going to get. “Or do you go by Akari Yukimura now?”

“Oh, no, just Kayano is fine.” She blinks. Hazama’s name tag glints in the sunlight. “Do you work here?”

"I'm only a volunteer, but I hope to have a job here in the future, yes. If you're looking for something, I can help you."

“Oh! That’s great, then.” Kayano reaches into her pocket, fumbling for the sip of paper she wrote the name of the book down on. She shows it to Hazama. “I might be starring in a film based on this book. Can you find it for me?”

Kayano used to read a lot, but juggling her acting career and her education, it’s hard to find time to do that kind of thing anymore. You have to be twenty to be an adult in Japan, but at sixteen, Kayano is as good as one, and just as busy. Still, she marvels like a child at the towering bookcases, the arching ceiling, the readers casually curled up on armchairs and sofas with their noses buried between the pages of a book. It’s beautiful, and it’s reflected in the quiet pride on Hazama’s face.

“Thank you so much,” Kayano says as Hazama hands her the book. “It means a lot to me.” It seems silly, thanking her for finding a book, but Kayano says it anyway.

“You’re welcome,” Hazama says with a nonchalant shrug. “I love this book. Don’t mess up your role. I won’t be happy if I watch it and find out you ruined one of my favourites.”

Kayano grins. “I won’t. Hazama — what you said earlier. Would it make more sense if I changed back to Akari Yukimura?”

Hazama scoffs. “Like _Kirara_ makes sense. Do whatever you want with your name.”

Kayano grins even wider at that. “Okay. I’ll do my best not to mess up my role.”

* * *

She’s walking home with Kanzaki one night when three muggers attack them. She breaks one’s nose, smashes another’s kneecap, and gets the third in a stranglehold until he passes out. His body makes a satisfying thump when it hits the pavement.

“Kaede,” Kanzaki says, eyes wide. “How do you know how to do that?”

Kayano watches the two men who are still conscious turn bone-white and run off, leaving their companion behind. Her hair has come out of the bun she arranged it in to avoid being recognised. She adjusts it now, in case any Haruna Mase fans decide to walk by. “I have to know martial arts for a lot of my roles,” she says, shrugging.

“In my first year of high school, I forgot half the assassination skills we were taught,” Kanzaki says ruefully. “Hey, didn’t this situation remind you of something? The trip to Kyoto, right?”

Kayano exhales, shaky with adrenaline. “Well, we didn’t need any of the boys this time. Or Korosensei.”

* * *

Kayano is seventeen when she dyes her hair back to brown.

It’s partly a career choice. Green hair may be cute and quirky when you’re a high schooler and constantly experimenting with your appearance anyway, but as she gets older, so do the roles she’s offered. She can’t be green-haired when it’s unlikely her directors want that of her characters.

But it’s also just wanting to be herself again — Kaede Kayano and Akari Yukimura and Haruna Mase, all at once. Mostly Akari. She stands in front of the mirror, long, wavy brown hair tumbling freely past her shoulders, and she’s so relieved, she almost cries.

Her phone vibrates. A text. It’s from Nagisa; he didn’t talk to her much last summer because he was busy shadowing a teacher at a nearby school, and he apologised for it. She said that it was fine, and not to worry about it. They’ve resumed contact again.

She glances at her phone, then snatches two hair ties from her dresser and ties her brown, brown hair up into the cat-ear pigtails that used to be her signature. She checks the mirror.

The hairstyle looks awkward and boring on her. Her hairdresser would cry if she saw it.

That fact makes Kayano beyond happy.

* * *

On the fifth anniversary of Aguri’s death, she purchases three photo frames and spends an hour flipping through the two photo albums that were left behind. Framing every photo in there and putting them up around the apartment seems unhealthy; she hardly wants to be surrounded by images of her dead sister. But keeping the albums tucked under her bed, never seeing the light of day, isn’t good either.

The first photo she selects is from when Aguri learned she was accepted for a teaching job at Kunugigaoka. They went out for dinner together and then took a walk through the park. A special fountain show was being held there, the kind with music and lights to go with the dancing streams of water. Kayano ran through the fountain, shameless, and eventually dragged Aguri in there with her. In the photo, they were both soaked to the bone, but neither of them minded.

The second photo is from a long, long time ago, when their father still made some attempt at paying attention to his daughters before handing Aguri off to Yanagisawa and Kayano to her manager. He’s not in the photo, fortunately, because he was the one who took it. Aguri and Kayano were in the ocean together, splashing each other with water, and Kayano protested she didn’t know how to swim but still waded after Aguri into the deeper areas.

Th third photo is of Aguri, Yanagisawa, and Kayano together, taken by one of his assistants. They were standing in front of the family pharmacy together, Kayano with a smile on her face even as she tried to stand as far away from Yanagisawa as possible. Aguri pulled her closer anyway, putting her arm around her.

Kayano doesn’t touch any of the other photos, but she takes a cold, vicious pleasure in cutting Yanagisawa out of this one, slashing his figure into a dozen different pieces, setting each piece on fire one by one, and then watching him burn to ashes.

* * *

Kayano finishes college a year early. She’s embarking on a huge new project, one that could take years and would cause her enough missed days next year she’d need to repeat it. It’s much more convenient to just get her diploma now, even if it means endless late nights studying until her eyes itch and getting out her notes whenever she has a break on set. More than anything, it’s _hard,_ but worth it.

* * *

Once, a few weeks after returning from the hospital, Okajima dared to make a crack about her breasts and instead of blushing or getting angry, she grabbed his wrist with a calm, cold smirk and squeezed until the bones creaked, ignoring his futile attempts to break her grip. “What the hell, Kayano?” he shouted, and she let go. “Damn. You used to be so _nice._ ”

“I’m sorry,” she said, eyes wide. “It was a gut reaction.”

She didn’t say _I didn’t mean it,_ because she did. Karasuma chastised her for excessive force, but later that afternoon, his eyes lingered on her a little too long when he was choosing sparring partners for PE class and he said, “Terasaka and Kayano.”

Terasaka had yet to spar with anyone below 155 cm, and he blinked at her, opening his mouth to protest. She shook her head at him and strode over, knife in hand. “Come on, then.”

“Kayano, are you sure about this?”

The last person Kayano sparred with before she tried to murder Korosensei had been Kataoka. The shorter girl had lasted two minutes, then let Kataoka knock her off balance and pin her down. “I surrender,” she’d said, with a self-deprecating little laugh, all while thinking that if Kataoka didn’t tuck in her chin, Kayano had a clear shot at ripping her throat out.

Not today.

Terasaka’s expression wavered, and she took that moment to lunge at him, kicking him in the kneecap. He let out a yelp of pain and dropped to one knee, lashing out at her with a fist. She dodged with an effortless ease that she wouldn’t have dreamt of exhibiting a month ago. All it took was the forward momentum from his swing and another kick to the back to bring him crashing to the ground.

She pressed the flat side of her dagger to his throat.

The boys mocked Terasaka for a week afterwards, but the thing she remembers best is Karma giving her an impressed look. “Bring it out more often,” he said, and offered her a high-five.

Kayano in her early twenties, having starred in plenty of action films in the past few years, could probably take half a dozen middle school Terasakas without breaking a sweat. She knows how to handle a knife and shoot a gun, and do both at once in high heels to boot.

“You didn’t lose all the abilities the tentacles gave you, did you?” she asks Itona one day. He comes over at least once a month to relieve her of the products of her stress baking.

He shakes his head. “My senses are still more accurate than they used to be. My reflexes are pretty good, too.”

Some of her abilities aren’t just from the tentacles, though. Out of curiosity more than anything, they push her coffee table aside and spar in her living room. It takes her less than five minutes to get him underneath her, pressing her elbow against his windpipe to discourage struggling. Scowling, he taps her palm in a signal of surrender.

She lets him up. ”You can have more pudding if it makes you feel better.”

“Consolation prize?“ He snorts. ”No thanks.”

Kayano is happy about it for days, basking in the strange afterglow.

* * *

They’re twenty-two years old when Nagisa asks her on a date.

She’s not interested in him anymore. It’s been years since she’s had that fluttery feeling in her chest when she hears his name, and she doesn’t miss it. She’s pretty sure she doesn’t even like boys, actually. She agrees to it anyway, but as friends, she tells him. _We haven’t seen each other in ages, you know._

He takes her to a small restaurant for dinner, compliments her on how pretty she is — _looks like both of us ditched the pigtails, huh_? — and they chat about old times, until — “What are they doing here?”

Nagisa follows Kayano’s gaze. A cluster of high school students are crouched in the bushes, whispering to each other and snapping photos. He turns an adorable shade of bright red as one of them giggles and points his way. Murmurs of “Aw, I didn’t know our teacher had a girlfriend!” and “Oh my God, I can’t believe it’s Haruna Mase!” filter out to them.

“Just come out,” Kayano says, waving them over. “Everyone can see you, you know.”

One by one, Nagisa’s students shuffle out — there’s six or seven of them, a mix of girls and boys — with their eyes on the ground and their ears red, but there’s a glint of mischief in their faces that they can’t quite mask. They’re all tall, hulking types with tattoos and black jackets that scream _delinquent._ Even Karma in his teenage years would’ve raised an eyebrow.

The one who’s clearly the ringleader, a bulky girl with bright pink hair and more piercings than Kayano can count, lifts her head to meet her gaze. “Are you really Haruna Mase?” she asks.

Kayano smiles at her. This one’s got over a head of height on the dark-haired woman and a lot of muscles, but Kayano knows if the girl saw her middle school self with tentacles and bloodlust in her eyes, she would run away screaming. “Yes, I am.”

Nagisa opens his mouth, about to chastise them, but before he can, another girl steps forward. “Can I have your autograph?”

Kayano tilts her head. “I’ll give an autograph to each and every one of you if you delete the photos I know you took on your phone.”

There’s some grumbling, but after a glare and a jerky nod from the ringleader, they all do it.

“ _And_ the videos,” Kayano adds.

Some more grumbling, but they all comply.

“Kayano, I am _so sorry_ about this,” Nagisa says, a faint blush on his cheeks. “I knew they tried to follow me here, but I thought I got rid of them. I had no idea they’d be so stubborn.”

“Oh, it’s no big deal.” She shrugs. “Now, who here has a pen?”

In the end, she has to sign autographs for not only the students, but also the manager and waiters so they don’t leak her identity to everyone else in the restaurant. The pink-haired girl is last in line, and when she requests a photo with her, Kayano complies on the condition it doesn’t get out on social media.

The height different is so huge, Nagisa has to back up several steps to fit them both into the frame. Kayano smiles, gentle and pretty, for the camera. The pink-haired girl doesn’t smile at all, but there’s a slight shine to her eyes.

“I think you’re the best actress in the world,” she says with utmost sincerity. “I’ve been watching your performances since I was eight. You’re amazing.” She shoots Nagisa an envious glare.

Kayano follows her gaze. “Just so you know,” she says, quirking her lips. “I’m not actually Nagisa’s girlfriend.”

“Oh, wow,” one of the boys says. “What do you know, I have a shot.” He immediately shuts up when the girl redirects her glare toward him.

Nagisa drives her home and tries to apologise one more time. She just shakes her head. “You love your students,” she says. ”Keep doing what you’re doing, Nagisa. You’re making a difference, like I always knew you would.”

He smiles at her. “Thank you. And thank you for what you did for Miyana. She’s one of my most troublesome students. I’ve been having a lot of trouble getting through to her.”

“You’ll get there,” Kayano says. She slants her gaze at him. “By the way, I’m really not your girlfriend.”

He laughs. “I didn’t think so.”

**Author's Note:**

> Talk to me about Assassination Classroom on Tumblr [@karushuus](http://karushuus.tumblr.com).


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